


To everything, there is a season.

by Mizzy



Category: Glee
Genre: F/M, M/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-24
Updated: 2011-07-24
Packaged: 2017-10-21 17:16:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/227656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mizzy/pseuds/Mizzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel Berry thought she knew pain. Until she opens the door. Until she sees them on the couch, blue lips, wide eyes, cold skin. Dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To everything, there is a season.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Gleeverse on behalf of the bestest team Team Teachers. <3

Rachel Berry thought she knew pain.

She had felt it right down to her bones when she sang painful songs, letting the emotion of them curl down her spine and through her muscles, resonating through the air. She learned from the masters, from Bernadette and Barbara and Patti, at how to translate pain to everyone, using the right tug of muscles, the right use of  _vibrato_. She could measure her breathing, careful and considered, to save air for a crescendo at just the right moment to break people's hearts using nothing but her voice.

One of her old vocal coaches used to tell her: art comes from artificial. Artifice.

Rachel never thought she was pretending at pain until now. Until she opens the door. Until she sees them on the couch, blue lips, wide eyes, cold skin.  _Dead._

She opens her mouth wide, like she's about to belt a show tune, and she screams.

-+-+-

The doctor says she's strained her voice box and she needs to rest her voice, and the doctors have been saying a lot of funny things, but this is one she can agree with. Rachel can't speak. There's nothing to say. There isn't a single song to cover this.

The doctor said Hiram had a heart attack, and sometimes, sometimes when someone loved another person too much, sometimes their body just gave up, and that's what Leroy had done. Found Hiram among the cushions, his life trembling from his body, and Leroy had held on and faded away with him.

She can't say a word. There aren't any words.

-+-+-

The entire Glee club is listed in Rachel's wallet as her emergency contacts. She is very thorough. The hospital has been over efficient at calling them all, or perhaps it's the usual - one of them is in trouble, so they all flock. 

Her silence is contagious. Their worried glances are too much, too much. There's a keening sound in the air, like a wounded animal would make.

"Rachel-" Mr. Schuester says, in a broken kind of voice, and Rachel clamps her hands around her throat, feels the telltale vibration of sound beneath her fingertips.

She's making that sound. She can't stop.

Finn, clueless Finn, sweet clueless Finn, moves in first. Tugs her against him. She's stiff like a doll, but she lets him hold her.

His arms lock like steel. Rachel buries her face in the rough processed wool of his sweater, and her shoulders shake. If she's crying, she can't tell; the world has been a blur. All that's left is the detergent of Finn's clothes in her nose, the world at a tilt, and nothing but burning, burning thirst.

-+-+-

The funeral is almost immediate. Jewish funerals always are. As there is a way to live as a Jew, there is a way to die. To be buried.

The law required an autopsy, so it is delayed for a day. Rachel sits and watches the bodies the whole time. She's not sure if it should be a male or female family member, but she doesn't have them to ask any more. The rabbi won't come because Leroy wasn't Jewish. Rachel should be mad, but she isn't; she's just numb.

A different Rabbi comes later in the day, saying Kurt and Mercedes found him, and Rachel just nods and nods and nods as he rattles off the questions. Her fathers already bought plots in the cemetery they wanted. They'll be close enough in their neat pine boxes, close enough to touch hands. They'll never touch hands again.

The actual funeral itself is a blur. Rachel's fingers find the torn black ribbon that Mr. Schuester pinned to her sweater - her faith's symbol of grief. The Glee club all wear them, and all look sad, and it's all too much, so Rachel's glad it's a blur.

At the end, they play a mash-up of Rachel's greatest hits on You Tube. Artie says how proud her fathers would be, and that Rachel should sing, and sing, and sing, in memory of them. Make them proud.  _Make them as proud of you as we are_ , Quinn says, in a shaky, honest voice.

Rachel had meant to stop singing. Had thought  _this is the thing I love the most_ , and Leroy had died when his most loved thing had stopped, so shouldn't she stop singing, just in case she lost it too? And then came the hurt, that she wasn't something Leroy loved enough to stay alive for, his own daughter...

She looks down at her pale, pale hands, at the thing they all knew but wouldn't take about, the biggest Jewish elephant of them all. She was Hiram's girl. They all knew it. But no one would say it. No one would ever say it.

They wouldn't, so she wouldn't. She would never let them down.

She would make them proud of her.

-+-+-+-+-+-+

It turns out to be Kurt's idea, saying in the service about her voice. 

She struggles enough of her voice out to ask how he knew. Rachel pictures her voice like a bird that can fly all the way to where her dads are now. Her words now fall flat, to the ground; forever away from getting to them.

Kurt looks at her with sad, sad eyes.

 _He knows,_  Rachel thinks,  _of course he knows how it feels_.

She used to wonder before, how come Kurt sometimes excelled where she didn't. She had hours of rehearsal on him, she knew it, they all did. But sometimes, in a song about hurt and grief and pain, Kurt was better than her, a million miles better.

Now she knows how. Now she can sing on that level too. Now she wishes she had never wished for it.

-+-+-+-+-+-

It takes a month for Rachel's voice to come back.

Finn takes her to the graveyard. It would be an odd date from anyone else, but with him, it feels so easy. It's going to be hard to leave him come the end of the year, but with her fathers gone, it's two less things holding her to McKinley.

She sits cross legged by their headstones. The sun is shining and the birds are singing, and it feels all wrong, like the world should have forgotten how to be happy now her fathers are gone from it.

Eventually Finn sinks down next to her, and pulls her against him. He sings something low into her hair. She can picture herself sat with him like this for a year, a decade, for the rest of her life. It doesn't hurt like she thinks it would.

His voice cracks on  _"A time to be born, a time to die_."

So she joins in. A word at a time. One note after another. That's how it will have to be.

" _To everything - turn, turn, turn  
There is a season - turn, turn, turn  
And a time for every purpose under heaven."_

Their voices together wind up into the sky, soft and unhurried. Beautiful and flying free. 

Like birds.


End file.
